The rise of the Iron Age —and the complete shift in the way the world worked that it caused—was likely an accident. And according to new research, a copper smelting site used roughly 3,000 years ago ...

The story of human progress is often told through the materials we have shaped and mastered. Stone gave way to bronze, bronze to iron, and iron to steel. Each shift brought not just stronger tools but ...

Buried deep in the south Georgia rolling hills, a tiny archaeological site has been rewriting history. Uncovered in the late 1950s, the Kvemo Bolnisi workshop was considered to be one of the ...

Copper smelters once used iron oxide to refine copper, unintentionally advancing the path toward iron metallurgy. Research conducted at Cranfield University provides new insight into the shift from ...

The dig site was originally analyzed in the 1950s, when archeologists found an iron oxide mineral called hematite and a waste product of metal production called slag. The original excavators believed ...

U.S. Steel’s notoriously outdated Edgar Thomson Works handles the molten substance left behind by smelting iron ore the same way it did 150 years ago: by dumping it into slag pits. They’re as low-tech ...

Ancient copper smelters may have accidentally set the stage for the Iron Age. At a 3,000-year-old workshop in Georgia, researchers discovered that metalworkers were using iron oxide not to smelt iron ...

Research from Cranfield University sheds new light onto the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, showing how experimentation with iron-rich rocks by copper smelters may have sparked the ...

The story begins at Kvemo Bolnisi, a smelting workshop perched on a hillside in the Caucasus. Soviet archaeologists first dug it up in the 1950s and immediately declared it one of the earliest iron ...

Unique archaeological find: divers recover nearly 200 ancient iron ingots from the Sava River, revealing trade links between Celts and Romans.